"Gather on the steps of stories..."

I'm floating tonight... I just got back from an evening that I'll always remember. There are two authors I cherish, who weave words into the most unimaginably beautiful fabrics, who garden the universe with planets rich with stories, who make life become art, and their art becomes love...

Jeanette Winterson is one of these two. Her books have been companions in the best and worst of times. She's a philosopher, and poet, and in my opinion a sculptor of thought too. She spoke of how important poetry is to make us human. She spoke of her life, and her past, and how precious the present is. "Love is art" she said, and you have to love the inside as much as the outside. There are only three endings in her opinion, "revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness", and if we all could accept and make peace with that eventuality, we could live the present with so much more feeling, beauty and meaning. My words do not do justice to hers...

I got to speak with her afterwards, and tell her how much she meant to me and the role her words had played in my life, just like so many others' had played in hers. I gushed about how her book Written On The Body was the perfect script to have had in my hand the first time I experienced the true meaning of love. She signed the most beautiful quote on it for me (see below). Her embrace was genuine and generous.

Earlier that evening she said: "false beginnings are not the problem, false endings are". We delude ourselves into believing, and hoping to believe, that we can have cinematic endings if we work hard enough on them- accepting things for what they are, separating and removing the bitterness from the anger, knowing that we all reach an end at some time and should love our emotional present with that reality- we could be so much happier...

Her quote, from the same book it's written on, reads "I don't know if this is a happy ending, but here we are let loose in open fields..." I remember reading this, and being in love, and crying.

I am in love again. With whom or what I do not know, but I feel it, and can smell it, and can taste it in me...

In ending, I want to quote a beautiful poem she shared at the end of the evening.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through 

to illuminate a small field for a while,
and gone my way 

and forgotten it.
But that was the pearl 

of great price,
the one field that had treasure in it.
I realize now 

that I must give all that I have 

to possess it.

Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future,
nor hankering after an imagined past.
It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle 

of the lit bush, to a brightness 

that seemed as transitory as your youth once,
but is the eternity that awaits you.

-R. S. Thomas